Entries in Trauma Care
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iStockphoto/Thinkstock(LONDON) -- Ian Roberts is an epidemiologist, but he's venturing into territory usually reserved for breakfast cereal ads and Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. He's created a Claymation cartoon to boost the use of a drug that could keep trauma patients from bleeding to death.

The drug, tranexamic acid, stops bleeding by helping blood clot. In 2010, Roberts, a professor at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, tested it in adult trauma patients who were bleeding excessively. The tests were part of a large clinical trial called CRASH-2.

As far as these large trials go, tranexamic acid was a success. In more than 10,000 patients who took it within eight hours of their injury, the drug lowered the risk of death to 14.5 percent and the risk of bleeding to death to less than five percent, compared with 16 percent and 5.7 percent for injured patients who received a placebo.

The drug is inexpensive, costing about $10 per patient. Roberts estimates that this generic, off-patent drug could save 140,000 lives around the world each year.

Despite the success of the experiment, there was one major problem: almost no one was using tranexamic acid. In a 2011 analysis of hospitals in the United Kingdom, Roberts found that out of 412 trauma patients who were eligible to receive the life-saving drug, only 12 did.

"I've been doing clinical trials for 20 years and you just don't get better results than what we got for tranexamic acid. It's cheap, it's safe and it's effective," Roberts said. "But lots of people don't even know about these results."

Roberts decided to spread the word about the drug. He recruited his nephew, Hywel Roberts, a 22-year-old animation student at the University of Bristol, to help him create a 40-second stop-motion Claymation video to describe the drug and encourage viewers to see the evidence of its effectiveness for themselves by reading the results of the CRASH-2 trial.

The video is geared toward doctors, a group that relies heavily on evidence and data to determine how to treat patients. But Roberts said he tried to use something other than cold, hard facts to catch the eye of medical professionals.

"What makes things move on the Web is emotion," Roberts said. "It's not a funny problem, but we were looking to inject surprise and a bit of emotion into it. That's the bit that scientists take out of their research."

Photo Courtesy - Getty Images(NEW YORK) -- One of the standard steps in most trauma care situations has long been to give the patient fluids by IV. But new research published in The Annals of Surgery calls that into question.

The research involved analyzing complete records of more than 11,000 patients in a national database, dating from 2001 - 2005. With nearly every type of traumatic injury or condition, researchers said the risk of death increases when intravenous fluids are administered. Those with severe head injuries were 34 percent more likely to die if they had been given fluids, for example.

Among the theories behind such numbers is the possibility that taking time to set up the IV delays transport to the hospital and that giving fluids may cause the release of a blood clot or may increase blood loss.